The Cause of the Grounding of M/V BRAER, How Crew Morale, Equipment Failure and Weather Conspired to Wreck a Tanker

The chain of events of January 5, 1993 that had started innocently enough involved a number of reasons including human error by not adequately preparing a vessel for sea, the extreme weather conditions that the vessel proceed into, and later, the lack of lead time for a rescue tug to prepare for a ship in distress. With all that had gone wrong that day, the very forces of nature that had assisted in the creation of this …

…began to break up thus attesting to the seaworthiness of, and high quality standards with which this ship was built. It was determined that human error during the at-sea welding of the storage racks for the spare pipes on the after deck of BRAER was the direct reason for this event. Had this welding work been done in port instead of at sea during one of their in-ballast trips, the grounding might never have happened.